Pitt Rivers Museum

In preparation for this year's Cheltenham Illustration Awards brief our tutor suggested we go to the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford. An afternoon of wandering about, sketching, taking photos was not enough. There is such an enormous amount of objects to look at that you could probably spend every afternoon in there for years and still discover things you never noticed before. The organization of the whole place was a bit strange - objects were divided by their purpose rather than any usual chronological/geographical area. Which meant you could walk around a case of hundreds of ivory objects from Italy to China, needles from Victorian England to pre-Columbian Mexico. It was interesting and did, in its own way, make sense. I managed to forget my camera but did a few sketches while looking around the place in amazement. I must have spent hours just staring at the great collection of netsuke they had, the Balkan and feather jewellery, the body modification section. I got a little too into sketching the skulls and shrunken heads (two of which are on the wikipedia page for shrunken heads!), which Cheltenham won't accept for the competition anyway haha. It's definitely a place I'll have to visit again sooner or later.